Watson, Ian - Novel 08 Read Free

which
was now trimmed back to a neat Vandyke. He wore no flaming crown of hair upon
his head, though; his scalp was as thoroughly bald as ever. Prematurely so, but
he had never chosen to have his scalp rejuvenated. He had been unreligiously
brought up, yet he had surely compensated for this later on, his bald pate
becoming a holy vessel to him: a ciborium, well polished by his palms,
containing the special material for communion with the psychological laity. His
beard burned under his chin like a flame heating and distilling the contents of
the old ancestral brain atop the spinal column, causing its contents to ascend
into consciousness.
                 “So
what maintains this fair climate?” Tanya asked. “With the sun
always at high noon in the sky?”
                 “ It’s morning and afternoon in other areas,” said Denise
foolishly.
                 “Permanently
. . . Maybe they had damn long nights lasting a year or ten years! Do they
migrate en masse? Hibernate?”
                 Sean’s
eyes roved. He took in the rich baize of the green, spotted here and there with
white and yellow flowers like pool balls, the bowers of giant berries, a
deer-sized finch with golden bars on its wings and a carmine harlequin mask
around its beak, an orange pomegranate husk the size of a diving bell resting
near the boskage with a jagged break in its side, and particularly the two
erotic gymnasts—so casually and joyfully naked even in the face of the starship
and the dead victims of the landing. He was conscious of a swelling in his
flesh which had already thawed out but not really awoken yet—not till now. Yet
it was a curiously innocent excitement he was filled with as more people
spilled back into the meadow to get on with what they had been doing before the
ship landed, in sublime—yes indeed,“sublime—disregard of the starship in their
midst. No, not disregard either. They simply seemed to regard it as something
other than what it was: something akin to one of those strangely baroque
citadels of rock which he alone believed he had glimpsed during the final
stages of the descent. Those formations had appeared to be partly natural and
partly sculpted or built; also—somehow—partly organic, growths of mineral
matter. Perhaps those were the people’s homes, castles, keeps? But how had they
come into being?
                 None
of the curious rock towers was visible from where the starship stood. However,
Sean held a printout photo of one loosely in his hand, taken during descent.
The others hadn’t seen it yet. Somehow it was a photo of something already in
his head, a photo of a dream, as though someone had built an archetypal image
he already knew from somewhere else.
                 “We
could try asking them,” he said.
                 Austin
Faraday shook his head. “We didn’t travel for eighty-seven years to run out and
throw our clothes off just because the water looks fine.”
                 “Take
a look at this.” Sean held out the photo which he’d been keeping to himself, he
realized, as though to him it particularly belonged. “I caught a glimpse of
several structures like this on the way down—just briefly. I managed to key in
on this one. It’s telephoto from about five thousand
meters up.”
                 The
color print, slightly blurred by the vibration of the descending starship,
showed a blue rock rising among neat bushy trees. The rock opened into tulip
petals or blue lettuce leaves. From this mineral rosette serrated pink spires
arose, and what looked like twin blades of stiff curving grass—as tall as
sequoias if he’d got his scale right. These blades converged above the pink
spires to support a hoop, a perfect circle high in the sky. A forked tree trunk
in the shape of a dowser’s wand bisected the spires, too, as though tossed
there by some fearful storm; yet the outcome of the storm was